Starting it All Over | Rebranding the Website and Blog

Welcome to Bee and Birch, previously known as Songs of the Sparrow.

SO WHY THE REBRAND?

Last week I had a blog, ‘Songs of the Sparrow’, but I decided to rebrand my website for a couple of different reasons. My mindset when I first started my blog was seeing it just as a hobby/a creative outlet for all of my passions, and I tried incorporating different elements into my blog. At one point, I tried incorporating my wishes to be a wedding photographer in. It just felt all over the place, and I was transitioning new interests and goals, it didn’t seem to fit with everything else that I created. At least in my mind. Who knows….perhaps I just needed a fresh start, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t mean for everything I had already created to disappear, it was just difficult to upload the backup and sort through everything. It’s similar to what I had before, but fresh.

Another reason I wanted to rebrand was because my goals for blogging had changed throughout the years. I lost my passion for it and became entirely too lazy on it. I also wanted to gain success as a blogger, and as quickly as possible. So I tried making posts that others have told me will get attention, and it was fine when I first started blogging because I was also passionate about a lot of these ‘popular’ type posts, but as I grow as a human and my interests and lifestyle changes, my blog also needs to be able to change. So here we are.

Why I will not be talking about makeup, skincare, and beauty products too much on my blog

So I used to be kind of obsessed with makeup and skincare. I would watch all the beauty Youtubers, beauty bloggers, and constantly be buying new products. I actually was sent free products from companies to review. Then, I became more aware of the toxins that are in most beauty products, and wanted to try to be less harmful to animals, my body, and the environment. So I cleansed my bathroom and thought I would just focus on vegan and non-toxic beauty products, but there was no passion behind it.

Instead, I wanted to talk about the importance of using non-toxic and vegan products, or how our society and mass media depict beauty, or my own experiences and journey in finding confidence and beauty without loads of products. So if I do find something that works well for me, I may talk about it, and I will probably discuss all of the things that I just mentioned, but reviewing beauty products will not be a high priority on this site.

So what is this blog going to feature now?

Travel/Nature will always be a part of this blog. Although we do not travel much, because we are not able to financially, we do a lot of road trips, including cross country, and spend a majority of our time outdoors…camping and hiking. We also have a dream we are working towards, which is buying and converting our very own campervan and living that camper van life. So I wanted to be able to incorporate all of our future adventures and our journey in our camper van on this blog.

Writing will be a strong feature here, including essays, journal posts, writing tips, blogging tips, my journey in writing a novel, and possible writing services. At the end of the day, writing is my number one passion, and a huge reason I started the blog to begin with, and another reason I rebranded was to focus more on writing.

Photography. I will admit, that before, I got pretty lazy, which resulted in me using stock photography. I want to try to avoid that and feature my own photography, which is something I’m extremely passionate about.

Me doing what I love. It’s not that you shouldn’t think about your audience, and who you are trying to target, but when you get caught up in numbers, you lose sight of your vision and your dreams. That’s why artists try to get agents of some kind, so they can do all of the pushing, the marketing, and the artist can just focus on what they love to do. I fell back in to a role of a producer, and needed to shift some of my priorities. Maybe this blog will one day provide me enough of an income to which it can be my main focus, but for now I’m not going to worry about that. I’m just going to create content I want to create.

Here is the truth about my blog before. I was consumed with the easy and the quantity of posts. When people want to move their blog from a hobby to a career, they want results, and they also want to gain success as quickly as possible. I was no exception, but the click baitable posts, the ones that you will see on almost every blog, just did not interest me. My passion for blogging, my passion for this space, this specific space that I created and cultivated to be my own, vanished. What was the point then? Maybe those posts found the numbers, but was I actually feeling like it was good work? That it mattered? No. I started to dread writing posts, because I just didn’t know how to use my voice with the posts I thought I should be writing. This thing that was once mine to share, became controlled by marketing schemes and what everyone else was blogging about. It’s not uncommon for this to happen to bloggers when they first start out. It’s the nature of any business. What’s going to sell? But if you gain a lot of attention and success from something you are not passionate about or proud of, then did you really find success?

I had been feeling this way for quite some time. I would dread writing, but still wanted to push out as many posts as possible, which I inevitably did not accomplish, and me being me, had an overwhelming amount of guilt about everything. This is a creative space that was supposed to bring my happiness, but it wasn’t.